“Importance of Sequences”

I have to understand my prowess in stimulating visual retention and having an entire film play in my head over and over in time, having to freeze frames and having to see the edit in full dimension beyond the confines of the two-dimensional viewing pleasure of the eye on the screen . I have the appointment to stretch the frame having to know each distance of the camera to other objects in the frame and also the choice of lens and the ability has never been an appointment beyond my means and measure but a love for cinema and an undying attention to detail and being on set has made me even more proficient in this detail.

A shot is the conveyance of visual information through the help of a camera. A Sequence is a set of shots compiled together to form a viable way of conveying visual information perceived by our senses. There are various means to compile a visual and story-driven approach to a sequence. Master storytellers and directors like David Fincher, Hitchcock, and Steven Spielberg is one of the most noteworthy in their stylistics and their approach in handling sequences. Like the famously notorious crop plane trying to buzzkill our protagonist in ‘North by Northwest’, Or the genius behind choreographing the opening to David Fincher’s Fight Club which has a sequence through the intermediate of a combination of VFX and shots have us move from the top floor of a building all the way to the basement and zooming in towards a van wired with explosives ready to blow, reasons for doing this is a way of expressing spatial understanding among audiences. Noting the distances between our characters and the bomb. A similar choice in his 2002 flick Panic room. Or the brilliant long take in Spielberg’s take on Well’s War of the Worlds having sentient alien tripodians vaporizing pedestrians into dust. The reason I pick these directors are because they all seem to have a ‘generational carrying on’ one could say but not of genes but of the way they approach sequences.

Hitchcock perfected the ‘long shot’, ‘foreshadowing’ through mere camera placements, and how can we forget his famous dolly zoom. But here plays the essence of a sequence a dolly zoom without the right shot accompanying it could hold different meanings.  Sequences done the right way could make a film feel like it was done in a single shot like Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope. Or the long take in Vertigo where our protagonist is assigned to his task and camera plays with character positions implying power and manipulation, an effective means to foreshadow the end. His successor on the effective use of sequences would be Spielberg although inspired by many other filmmakers, his approach to stylizing shots and sequences like his famous reflection on window shot, long takes and use of silhouettes. He adds onto what Hitchcock leaves behind. And David Fincher adds to both their styles heavily drawing inspiration from Hitchcock. He is in production on the Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train. His use of these shots is that of these geniuses but on steroids, like the amazing long take in Fight Club as our protagonists enter the bar achieved through over cranking the frame and then slowing it down for a smooth take. Or the many silhouettes in the film ‘Seven’. In an interview, he once said he composes his shots based on a fraction behavior by time. If you pay close attention to his shots his camera aligns directly with his subjects, being perfectly centric with their movement this is done with every shot achieving the effect of immersion. If you haven’t noticed a watch of this is a rewarding one.

In essence a mastery over sequences and its accompanying shots are a way to express a story to the best way possible but documentary films have a whole new dimension to this aspect since most of the things happen on the spot with no visual reference unless intended to do so. Documentary filmmaking requires a lot of instinctual advocacies in bringing out a story in it’s purest but knowledge on how shots and sequences are performed in fiction are deeply ingrained in the language of cinema to bring about a cinematic outlook. Documentary films achieve this with this use of archival footage, interviews, on location shots and voiceovers, to achieve a similar effect.